Chelsea v Arsenal 22 March 2014 – The Match Officials; cards likely

Chelsea v Arsenal 22 March 2014 – The Match Officials

Andrew Crawshaw

Referee – Andre Marriner

Assistants – S Ledger and M Perry

Fourth Official – A Taylor

Third time this year with Mr Marriner following our home wins v Hull (4 Dec – 2-0) and v Sunderland (22 Feb – 4-1). Whilst Mssrs. Ledger (9/22) and Mr Perry (14/21) are fairly normal partners with Mr Marriner, so far we have only had Mr Perry with Mr Marriner once, although both have been with other referees.

Surprisingly this is the first time that Mr Marriner has been in charge of a Chelsea gamer his year.

The Arsenal and Chelsea

Total Games

Win %

Draw %

Loss %

Arsenal All Games

826

53.8

26.3

19.9

Mr Marriner

18

66.7

11.1

22.2

Chelsea All Games

827

52.5

25.6

21.9

Mr Marriner

19

58

21

21

So for Arsenal a significant over performance under Mr Marriner with more wins and fewer draws, Chelsea much closer to their all referee average.

What about his bias numbers though? Last Year Mr Marriner was on a par with Mr Dean being one of the less biased against Arsenal with a score of -24 so not too bad

For Chelsea last year he exhibited a solid bias in favour as shown in this chart.

I won’t include the Arsenal chart this week as you had it last week and you all know by now that it is solidly red from top to bottom.

So so far no real reason for either team to be particularly upset with his appointment. I’ll dig a little deeper.

Min 5 – Collison plants his studs on Wilshere’s foot, should have been a yellow card but no foul given

Min 17 – Collison scores a goal (0-1)

Min 18 – West Ham have a phantom foul called against either Ramsey or Sagna

Min 21 – Podolski scores a goal (1-1)

Min 24 – With the ball out of play Vaz Te kicks Mertesacker’s Achilles should have been yellow card, nothing given

Min 30 – west ham have another phantom foul, this time against Podolski

Min 41 – Vaz Te rightly gets a booking for dissent for protesting that he wasn’t offside (he was right as he was level, but that doesn’t excuse his dissent). As he should have been booked in Minute 24 he should have been sent off – wrong Important Decision

Min 46 – Giroud scores (2-1)

Min 52 – Cazorla scores (3-1)

Min 53 – Walcott scores (4-1)

Min 56 – Giroud scores (5-1)

Min 71 – Potts and Sagna collide when challenging for the ball in an aerial duel. No foul committed by either player but Potts is seriously hurt and leaaves the field on a stretcher after a delay for treatment of ten or eleven minutes. Neither side felt like playing much after that and the game petered out.

Min 89 – Diame plants his studs on Mertesacker’s leg, acknowledged it but still should have been booked.

Arsenal started slowly but really got going in the second half playing some unstoppable football with four goals in ten minutes. A few phantom fouls by Marriner and he missed some yellow cards which should have resulted in Vaz Te being sent off.

With reference to Walter’s articles on injuries, note the non calls in Minutes 5, 24 and 89.

Min 51 – Emanuelson dives getting Arteta a yellow card, wrong way round card should have gone to Fulham player (lots of wrong decisions arising from this incident)

Min 89 – Giroud gets a red card, correct decision but harsh in that he clearly slipped but he did catch the Fulham player.

The game was played in awful conditions with extremely heavy rain, overall Mr Marriner did OK but made a ‘horlicks’ of the incident in Minute 51 which is how his overall score was so low. Fulham battled all game with ten men and made Arsenal work really hard for the win. Other than the two red cards there were no nasty tackles.

Both teams out-perform their average win percentages under Mr Marriner, Arsenal by the higher figure.

Last year Mr Marriner’s wrong Important Decisions were in favour of Chelsea as they benefited from not having two players sent off in the QPR game but should have had a penalty as well, any of those decisions, if correctly given, could have changed the outcome of that game as it ended 0-0. They also had a penalty wrongly awarded in the Stoke game when they were well ahead.

Against Arsenal, Mr Marriner exhibited the usual tendencies to award phantom fouls and failed to issue yellow cards to opponents for bad contact fouls with the potential to injure players.

There’s nothing I would like more than to see the likes of Abramovich and co squirming very uncomfortably perched on top of there ill gotten games, but alas these are worrying times I can see it all ending in tears.